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Garden

Cuttings

News and notes for the gardener.

By JUDY STARK
Published July 8, 2006

Put your best foot forward

Create these unusual garden steppingstones yourself with polystyrene molds. You mix, color and pour the concrete to create as many as you like. The stones are between 15 and 16 inches square, 2 inches thick. Designer Catherine Failor offers many other stone designs, plus molds for edging strips, garden stakes, pot feet and plaques. The stone molds are $24.95. See more and order at www.gardenmolds.com.

Good for body and soul

Here are the words we've all been longing to hear! A study from Erasmus University Medical Centre in Rotterdam, Netherlands, shows that people who garden for only a half-hour a day, five days a week, live about 18 months longer than those who are less active, Country Living Gardener magazine reports.

Growing egos

Gardeners have become a bunch of snobs, says cultural anthropologist Jane Nadel-Klein, a professor at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., who has made American gardens her next research subject. It's quite a switch for Nadel-Klein, who has spent most of her career documenting the demise of Scottish fishing villages. At a flower and garden show in Hartford last winter, Nadel-Klein noticed a T-shirt for sale with the message: "Friends don't let friends buy annuals." She laughed, then wondered why people who plant pansies and petunias are not considered real gardeners. "It has a definite class bias," she says. "Annuals are not associated with serious gardeners."